


You Don't Meet Nice Girls in Coffee Shops

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Drunkenness, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:47:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draft Day's over, and Natalie goes looking for someplace to hide. But some days New York's a smaller place than you might think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Don't Meet Nice Girls in Coffee Shops

**Author's Note:**

> Written December 2007 for sn_holidays on LiveJournal, from Meadowlion's prompt: _A story featuring Jenny/Natalie. Jeremy can appear, but I'd like his participation in the pairing to be limited_. Thanks to Leiascully for the beta, and to Kmousie for help with sports analogies.

When the show is finally, _finally_ over, Natalie grabs her coat and runs. She doesn't wait for the post-mortem, doesn't wait until Isaac descends from his office like the Wrath of God and shoots them all down in flames or, worse, with cold, brutal sarcasm. She'll catch hell for it, but she'll deal with that tomorrow, deal with everything tomorrow. Tonight – tonight she's had all she can take. She can't stand to look at Dan's white, wretched face one moment longer, or see the hard lines around Casey's mouth, the puzzlement and misery in Dana's eyes when, just a few hours ago, she'd been bubbling over with Draft Day anticipation. Any other time Natalie would stick around, try to cheer her up, at least provide a shoulder to cry on, but not tonight. Tonight she can't stand watching Dave and Will and Chris work in silence, gazes averted, trying to pretend they can't see the show crumbling about their ears, or bear Kim's smug, 'you've all fucked up and now your jobs are _mine_', cat-that-got-the-cream expression, or listen to Elliott _humming_. Most of all she doesn't want to think about how much of this debacle might have been her own fault, that if she'd just been a little kinder, a little more careful, if she hadn't let her bad mood spill over into the studio, then maybe Danny wouldn't have snapped.

And whose fault had that bad mood been?

One guess. No, not even one. It's all too obvious, surely.

That's right. Jeremy's.

Jeremy.

Right at this moment, Natalie honestly doesn't care if she never sees him again as long as she lives.

She rips off the stupid teeshirt in the elevator, scrunches it up into a tight ball and buries it far, far down in her bag. _I survived Draft Day at Sports Night_ – and, to make things worse, it's green, the colour of bad luck. What in the world had Dana been thinking, for crying out loud, wasn't that tempting fate, just _begging_ for some disaster to strike them down? And see? See what had happened?

Out in the street, she's surprised to find that it's still daylight. The horror that was Draft Day seems to have dragged on for about a hundred years but, really, it's only early evening. It's not a time of day that Natalie's used to, and for a moment she hesitates, uncertain where to go, what to do, how best to work out her frustration. She could go get changed, go running, work out at the gym, sweat the day out of her system; she could call a friend or two, rent a chickflick, order pizza, have a girls' night in. She could soothe her troubled mind with culture, check out a gallery, or a play, or an arthouse movie. Or a comedy club; god knows, she could use the laughs. She could get dressed up and go out dancing …

Or she could quit trying to fool herself. It may be early, but early, late, makes no difference here in New York City. Somewhere out there is a bar – _not_ Anthony's, not any sort of sports bar, not any bar that might be airing a rerun of the Show From Hell, but someplace new, someplace different, someplace with a corner seat where she can hide and a bottle of gin she can crawl into. That, to be perfectly honest, is all she wants. That's as much as she can possibly deal with right now.

She finds a place a little way off the beaten track, away from the traffic and the tourists: quiet, cosy, almost empty. Snags a table, gulps down the biggest, dirtiest martini the bartender can make her, signals for another and meets his 'tell me all your troubles' look with a glare that freezes him in his tracks. Meekly, he mixes her drink and brings it across to her; she smiles, scoops up the glass, and turns away, dismissing him.

That's when Natalie discovers that, bad as it's been, the day can, actually, still get a little worse.

A laconic voice says, "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns …" and she glances up.

_No!_

Yes.

Oh, _fuck_.

She starts to stand, abandoning her glass. "I was just –" she begins, and then she thinks no, the hell with it, I came here for a drink, I'm entitled to that, why should _I_ be the one to leave? She squares her shoulders and summons up all the self-control that was so spectacularly lacking in the studio earlier on.

"Um … it's Jenny, right?" she says, and, feeling absurd, puts out her hand. Jenny takes it and presses it warmly, smiling.

"Good to see you again," she says, and glances around the bar in a rather too self-consciously casual way. "Are you here alone?"

Is she hoping that Jeremy's hiding in a corner somewhere? Lurking in the men's room, maybe? But why should he be? She must know their entire history by now, surely she knows that Natalie and Jeremy can hardly stand to be in the same room together any more, let alone go out for a companionable after-show drink.

Come to think of it – why is _Jenny_ here alone? Wasn't that why she'd come to the studio – to wait until Jeremy finished work before sweeping him out for a fabulous, glittering evening of – of … whatever it is that choreoanimators do for fun?

Oh, god. That's assuming that she really is alone. If Jeremy actually is here – hiding in a corner, lurking in the men's room – then Natalie is going to break right down and scream. Very, very loudly.

She fixes a smile on her face. "It was kind of … um, intense today, at work," she explains, trying to sound light and bright and perky, trying to sound _normal_. "Sometimes you just need some time to yourself, you know?"

That's a hint. Jenny doesn't take it. Instead, and much to Natalie's dismay, she says, "You mind?" and pulls out the chair opposite to Natalie's ("Be my guest," Natalie murmurs, resigned), settling herself down for what looks horribly like the long haul. The bartender brings her a beer, and she smiles dazzlingly up at him as she thanks him. Something about that expression, the tilt of her head, seems familiar, but Natalie can't quite figure out why. She's seen it before, she's sure, but – where?

Half of Jenny's beer vanishes down her throat in one long swallow. She sets down the bottle, tips back her head and rolls her shoulders, and lets out a heartfelt sigh. "Oh, god, did I ever need that!"

Now Natalie's curious. Did something happen between Jenny and Jeremy? Is that why Jeremy was so quiet throughout the last part of the show? She'd thought, or would have thought if she'd been paying any attention to Jeremy at all, that it was just the pressure in the studio getting to him, the way it was getting to everyone else. Apart from Kim, that is.

Oh, please. Has Jeremy managed to screw things up _again?_ Already?!

It's a lovely, lovely idea, and Natalie would lay money on it being true. And, whatever Jeremy might think, Natalie is a _damn_ good poker player; she knows how to lay out her cards, she knows when to play or fold, she knows how to bluff. So, very, very casually, she says, "Did you enjoy your visit?"

Jenny blinks at her, apparently miles away inside her own little head. "H'mm?"

"To the studio," Natalie clarifies. "Did Jeremy show you around? Introduce you to people?" Did any of them care, she wonders, and, if so, she wants their names and Social Security numbers, thank you. They're her colleagues, and they're supposed to be on _her_ side.

"Oh!" Jenny says. "Yes. Yes, he did." She picks up her beer bottle again, starts picking at the label with her thumbnail – which makes Natalie smile; Dan does the exact same thing when he's nervous – then starts sliding it up and down (slowly, oh, so slowly) between the palms of her hands in what Natalie can't help but think is kind of a questionable sort of way, and which is not a concept that she wants to associate with Danny at all, no matter what Alyson and Monica might speculate is the real nature of his relationship with Casey.

Jenny doesn't appear to have anything more to say, and the silence between them is not a comfortable one, not by any means at all. For want of better inspiration, Natalie offers a lame, "I guess none of us ever met a choreoanimator before. It must be really – "

Jenny glances up sharply. She closes her eyes, breathes out once, deeply, then looks back up. "Natalie," she says. "You're all smart people. Don't you think there's a reason none of you knows what a choreoanimator is?"

Taken aback, Natalie can think of nothing to say but "Excuse me?"

"It's because there's no such thing!" Jenny explodes. "I'm not a choreoanimator, what in god's name is up with that? I'm an adult film actress, and if that's too much for some people, if they're _ashamed_ of me, or _embarrassed_ by me, then fine! That's fine! They can be embarrassed and ashamed all they want, but they don't get to _be_ with me!"

This time Natalie finds she's at a loss for words entirely. Her mind, though – oh, her mind is working overtime. Partly it's dancing with what she freely admits is evil glee, partly it's stunned into incredulity.

An adult film actress? A _porn star?!_

Jeremy's been dating a porn star? He ditched Natalie because he couldn't keep up with her wild and crazy go-clubbing-maybe-twice-a-year lifestyle, and now he's dating a freaking _porn star?!_

And oh, yes, Natalie knows who she is now. The drab, everyday clothes and the mousy ponytail had been a pretty good disguise, but Natalie never forgets a face (as if it's Jenny's _face_ that's the big attraction here). That choreoanimator crap had had her blindsided, but she would've figured it out sooner or later. She should have caught on when Jenny was giving her hard-luck 'one time someone asked me to draw' speech, because who the hell talks like that anyway? God. How could she have been so stupid?

It's ironic, really, if you think about it (how can you _not_ think about it?), and Natalie hates irony. Not just because – thank you, Alanis – it's probably the most misused word in the English language, right up there with 'momentarily', but because it's … well, _spiteful_. Yes, spiteful, that's the word. It's the universe lying in ambush, waiting to see you trip over your own feet, slip on a banana peel, fall flat on your ass, just so that it can jump out, laughing and pointing and yelling 'Gotcha!'.

So: ironic. Ironic, why? Because it had been Natalie, really, who'd been the one to introduce Jeremy to Jenny, Jenny the, as-it-turns out, ho. Not so much in the sense that she'd been hanging around in some sleazy downtown bar, trying to pimp out her ex-boyfriend to any woman whose standards were low enough to want him – Natalie has better things to do with her time, thanks, Natalie has _friends_, actual friends who like to be with her and who accept her for what she is – but she'd been the one who'd first brought Jenny's negotiable charms to Jeremy's attention. Except it hadn't so much been Jenny; it'd been Jenny's other self, her porn star alter ego. Because Jeremy hadn't had a single porno to his name when Natalie first got to know him. At first she'd assumed that he'd hidden his collection to spare her feelings, or possibly to save himself embarrassment, and she'd been touched by his thoughtfulness, but as days ran into weeks wore into months and more and more dirty little secrets came to light – as they got to the stage in their relationship when he no longer bothered to scrub out the bathroom before she visited, and she downgraded to her second-best lingerie – still there was no trace of porn. It was a tiny apartment and it didn't boast much in the way of hiding places, and those that it _did_ have Natalie had located early on and searched quite thoroughly, and still: no porn. Which was a puzzle. It had to be there, it stood to reason: fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, the Red Sox hate the Yankees, and men collect porn the way black laundry collects lint. And that's all men, no exceptions. Natalie might not know much, but she'd had her fair share of boyfriends, and _that_, she knows.

She'd thought about it and thought about it, and eventually she'd come to the conclusion that he must've ditched his stash, knowing he couldn't hide it and thinking that it'd make her uncomfortable, maybe, or that she'd be upset, or even hurt. That had made her smile: it was sweet, and naïve, and so, so typically Jeremy! But Natalie knew how to be a good girlfriend: don't cling, don't try to change them (not so that they'll notice, not too much too soon), pretend to laugh at their jokes and, most of all, lots of sex and no questions asked. So one day she'd shown up at Jeremy's apartment with a heavy bag and a mysterious smile, pulled out a handful of tapes and dropped them on the coffee table, and watched Jeremy's eyes grow big as saucers.

He'd gulped and said, "What's this?" as though it wasn't obvious from the less-than-subtle cover art: lots of breasts, lots of writhing, very little in the way of clothing. She'd smiled a little more, catlike (she liked to think) and seductive.

"Just a few movies," she'd said. "I thought we could watch them together. And then," (and she'd weaved her way around the coffee table to stand over Jeremy as he slumped back into the couch, leaned forward, arms on either side of him, slid onto his lap, straddled him and given a little wriggle of promise) "… then … maybe we could … re-enact them …" She pressed closer. "Or just … just the _good_ bits …"

It shouldn't have been possible for Jeremy's eyes to grow any wider, but they had, to the extent that Natalie had feared they might pop out of his head entirely. He'd said "Natalie – " in a whiny sort of voice that might have been a half-protest, but she'd shifted a little in his lap, said, "You like that, baby?" and leaned forward and kissed him. After which there was no time for argument, and the movies went unwatched after all.

That was maybe the only time in their relationship when arguing hadn't been a part of the deal. God knows, they'd argued about every other little thing under the sun, argued up one side and down the other, sometimes crossing over in the middle, and eventually parting company altogether. And that – that was where Jenny had come back into the picture, this time in person, although mercifully fully clothed. Natalie isn't sure if it's a consolation that Jeremy, faced with a relationship with a real, live porn star, is still, apparently (a) managing to screw it up spectacularly, (b) too much of a coward to admit to it, and (c) has, as a consequence, evidently treated the poor woman (Natalie thinks, in a brief, rallying moment of sisterhood) like dirt. It's equally possible that all of that just makes her hate him even more. Doesn't matter. It's over. Couldn't be more over if it was nailed up in an oakwood box and buried six feet under.

So much for memory lane. Back in the here and now, she sighs. "Oh. I guess that explains … a lot." She decides, since it's about the only card she still holds, against letting Jenny in on the knowledge of how Jeremy had figured out her secret identity. "I suppose the choreoanimator thing was his idea?" Jenny nods, and Natalie sighs again, partly in exasperation, partly out of regret for her lovely fantasy of dancing cartoon animals. "I can't believe I fell for that." She flings up her hands. "But I did. Swallowed it hook, line and sinker." That's ironic, too, given that Jeremy's the one who's sometimes been likened to a fish.

Jenny's face splits into an unexpected grin. For a woman in her line of work she looks, at this moment, bizarrely like a naughty schoolgirl. On reflection, that's not such a stretch. She's almost certainly played that role at least once in her life.

"Oh, that's nothing. You ought to see some of the things _I've_ swallowed."

"I'm familiar with your work, thank you," Natalie says primly, realising too late that admitting her own knowledge of the field of adult film will erode the moral high ground she might've wanted to maintain.

Jenny feigns amazement – "A nice girl like you!" – and signals for another round of drinks.

"I'm not that nice," Natalie says. She doesn't know why it comes out so defensive.

Jenny settles back into her seat and her eyes rake Natalie up and down. "Uh-huh. Let me guess. Parents loaded? Catholic school? Eastern college? Daddy's little girl?"

They're accusations rather than questions, and they strike like bullets. Natalie hopes she doesn't flinch. "Is this any of your business?" she demands.

Jenny waves a hand, dismissing the protest. "You heard my life story. Why don't we trade?" She tilts her head and takes a closer look. "What else? Let's see … I'm guessing you spent most of your teens looking for something to rebel against. H'mm …" She gives it a moment's thought. "You wouldn't have slacked off school – you wanted to get away to college, so you needed to be sure you got good grades … Lots of really crappy boyfriends?" She's watching Natalie closely. "Scary guys, the boys everyone said were trouble – did you go for them? Or was it just the wrong kind of guys? Wrong colour, wrong class, wrong religion?" Natalie shrugs uncomfortably. "Did you make sure to bring them home to show off to your Mom and Dad? So they'd have to act polite, when you knew they were just dying inside?" She looks up, and whatever she sees seems to amuse her. She flashes another grin. "What else? Late nights, loud music, wild parties, for sure. At least one boy with a motorcycle. And I bet you got a tattoo, somewhere down the line."

Forgetting that she's wearing jeans, Natalie instinctively crosses her ankles to hide the tattoo that runs up her left calf, and Jenny barks out a laugh.

"I knew it! And you're still doing it – right? Didn't you just pick Jeremy because he's not like the boys your parents wanted you to date?"

That's a little too close for comfort. Natalie finds she's gulped down her drink, glares the bartender back to her and orders another. This'll be, what, her third – no, fourth – and he's pouring her double measures. You'd think she'd start to feel or, rather, stop feeling _something_ by now, but no, no such luck. Just when a little oblivion would be welcome, she appears to have developed alcoholic immunity. Remembering her manners she nods toward Jenny, who flashes a 'thank you' and orders plain seltzer water this time. She sees Natalie's surprised look, and shrugs. "Early start tomorrow," she explains. "I'll be on my back all day …"

"Spare me," Natalie says coldly, although a little bit of her wants to laugh, wants to like Jenny. Wants to admit that, if things were different, they might, almost, be friends.

They have so much in common, after all. They both, right at this moment, hate Jeremy Goodwin's breathing guts.

Jenny leans forward confidingly. "So, tell me, Natalie – why Jeremy? Why not … oh, I don't know … why not Dan Rydell? I mean, your parents wouldn't like him very much either, and he's _way_ hotter." She sits back. "You think he's out of your league?"

That almost makes Natalie laugh. Danny? God, no, she's never thought of Danny that way – he's just a big kid and, besides, it'd be like dating her own brother. Thank heavens for that, too. The way he's been these past few months, self-absorbed and miserable one moment, bouncing off the walls the next, she never could have stuck it out. She would've ditched him, just like Rebecca had, he'd've probably gone completely to pieces, and then she would've had that on her conscience to add to all her other woes. "Dan's got his own problems," is all she says. "I don't need them."

Jenny stretches out a foot and lightly kicks her under the table. "_Man_, Natalie, that's cold! Is that why you and Jeremy split up?"

Natalie's puzzled. "Because I don't want Dan's problems?"

"Because you don't _care_ about Dan's problems," Jenny says. "Because you don't much care about anyone else's problems except Natalie's. Am I right?"

"Fuck you," Natalie snaps – that's too much; who the hell does this woman think she is? – and starts to push up out of her chair. But suddenly the four martinis hit home, and she finds herself swaying. There's a hand under her elbow, supporting her; Jenny's jumped up and come around to help her. So maybe she's not so bad after all.

"It's okay," she's saying now, voice low and comforting. "Take it easy. Do you need to throw up? Need me to hold back your hair?"

Natalie shakes her head. "I need to go home," she says, and suddenly she wants to cry. There's too much of Jeremy still in her apartment: his teeshirts, his socks, the special dermatological soap he insists he has to have, a pen, a notebook, a packet of gum. Flakes of his skin and hair, his DNA infesting the very air that she breathes every day of her life.

The memories of his touch on her skin; memories that can never be erased.

She can package up his stuff and hand it back to him – why hasn't she done it already, for god's sake? – but the rest of it, the rest of it will be there forever.

Her home isn't home any more. It's not a sanctuary. It's a mausoleum, a memorial to misplaced dreams, lost hopes and dead desires.

"Don't let it get to you," Jenny's telling her. Her arm's around Natalie's shoulders now, her skin so very close to Natalie's; warm, comfortable, strangely familiar. "He's just a guy. Just an ordinary, messed-up guy, who's too scared to step outside of his own little box and take a chance, and too damn dumb to see when he's got something really great going for him."

Natalie cranes her head around to look at the other woman. She has to squint; Jenny's mostly a blur from this angle. "You talking about me, or about you?" she wants to know.

"Both of us," Jenny says. "We deserve better, Natalie. I know that _I_ do, and I'm pretty sure about you. Don't you think so?" She tightens her hold into a gentle hug, eases Natalie back down to her seat; stands and looks at her for a moment, then leans forward, lets her lips brush softly across Natalie's cheek. "You're okay, Natalie. You wait here, I'll go get you a cab." And she's gone.

Natalie's mind is spinning furiously, if fuzzily, in about a million different directions that all lead back to the same thought: she doesn't want to go home, not back to her Jeremy-infested apartment. She doesn't want to be alone. And Jenny really is very warm, and very soft, and very nice. For a, you know, a porn star. Which suddenly doesn't seem such a bad thing, because it means – doesn't it? – that Jenny is likely to be receptive to all sorts of new and different possibilities …

Maybe. Or, at the very least, open to a little friendly persuasion.

Natalie hasn't tried anything like this since those few times in college, but she thinks she remembers enough to get by. She shakes her head, trying without success to clear it, blinks around for her jacket and purse, pulls herself up to her feet, and heads determinedly in the direction that Jenny had gone.

Because, yes: yes, Natalie does deserve better. And tonight? Tonight, she's going to see that she gets it.

*

She wakes late the next morning to find herself tucked up in her own neatly-made bed, still fully dressed but for her coat and shoes, head splitting and mouth tasting of pure evil, and with not much memory of anything except a vague sense of _oh, shit!_ Two Tylenol and a lukewarm cup of instant coffee made with hot water from the tap revive sufficient brain cells for her to remember enough about yesterday's show to wish that she didn't. She briefly considers calling in sick, maybe for the rest of her life. Maybe she'll win the lottery tonight, maybe she'll never have to work again. That would solve everything.

On the other hand, more probably not, so there's no sense in putting off the inevitable. She showers and washes her hair, dresses carefully (choosing her best work clothes like armour), pencils in eyes where last night seems to have left her with none, and she's out the door, her mind running worst-case scenarios as she goes.

The flurry to get into work on time drives everything else from her mind. She buys a paper and reads it, strap-hanging, wondering if they've made front page news. They haven't; there's not even a footnote in the sports section. You'd think someone would've snapped it up – god knows, she could've written the headline herself: 'Rydell Drops the Ball!' – but it helps her breathe a little more easily. Maybe it wasn't as bad as it seemed. Maybe their luck has held and they've got away with it.

She steps out of the elevator into a wall of ice. Uneasy silence in the newsroom; Isaac and Dana locked away in a meeting somewhere; Casey, cloistered in his office, door closed, emerging every so often to snap out a demand then retreating again, his black mood almost a visible, physical entity, which does not make up for the other physical absence. Dan's not there.

She wonders if she'll ever see him again – if any of them will – but there's no time now to worry too much about it. The show's coming apart at the seams, and _somebody_ needs to take the threads in hand and somehow knit or weave or braid them back together again. That's all that really matters.

Natalie takes a long, deep breath, and gets to work. Everything else can wait.

***


End file.
